January 2025, on Chalk Streams
TALES FROM THE HILLS
(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)
Up here we have no streams. Rainwater vanishes underground to re-emerge near Hurstbourne Tarrant as one of the rarest habitats on Earth: a chalk stream. The Hampshire Naturalists say that 85% of the world’s 220 chalk streams are in southern England. The Bourne is one of the finest.
Our rainwater feeds both the Bourne and the Test, so this tale can hardly stop at the parish boundary.
There’s another good reason to follow the rain: one of the ‘sacred texts’ of fly-fishing – Where the Bright Waters Meet, by Harry Plunket-Greene – is set on the Bourne. When fly-fishing featured recently in an old Midsomer Murders, the show included a character named Sir Harry, and two others named Plunket. Fame indeed!
As with all great books, you don’t need to know anything about fly-fishing to enjoy it. There are anecdotes galore: Harry tells us they played cricket against Highclere; and that his landlord on the Bourne was the Earl of Portsmouth, whose name, for some reason, is still conspicuously displayed in the church at Ashmansworth.
A trout in a chalk stream, moving effortlessly in just six inches of bright water, is a creature worth seeing. On one sunny day, in the car park at Tesco in Whitchurch, there were four beautiful trout moving effortlessly against the shallow flow of the Test, swimming so lazily that they remained there, quite untroubled by us or the traffic, as if they knew that, so long as they stayed in the car park, they were safe. They were probably right.
The Bourne joins the Test near Hurstbourne Priors; the Test flows on through Broadlands where the King himself has fished, and so to the docks at Southampton to float, in Harry’s day, the Titanic preparing for her maiden voyage.
Sir Walter, the dry-fly fisherman in The Thirty-Nine Steps, claims that the Kennet beats the Test. We’re neutral on that one, as we’re on the watershed, supplying rainwater to both rivers. But Harry, who fished both rivers, and many others here and on the Continent, is quite adamant: the Test is the king of the world’s trout streams, and the Bourne is the queen.
So, for the chalk streams and the trout, let it rain!
Agricola, January 2025
